Theme Of Discrimination In The Color Purple

Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, is about the severity of discrimination and its effect on an individual. This illustrates the idea that discrimination and prejudice can ultimately curve someone's view of the world around them. Through motifs in the novel, the point of view of the characters, and the foils seen in the characters, we can see this theme take effect through the main characters in the novel.

Alice walker used the motif of sex to define and represent the relationships between the characters to convey Celie’s distortion on the world around her because of these relationships. In her early years when Celie was just 14, she was raped by her thought to be father and was put through traumatic experiences. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying “You better shut up and git used to

Nettie isn’t the only one with an important story to tell though, even though Celie is uneducated, she has an important and powerful story to share as well. Walker chooses Celie as the narrator with this first person subjective point of view to show that it doesn’t matter if you’re black, uneducated, poor, etc., everyone has an important story to share. Her experience with women’s rights and discrimination influence this powerful story.

The foils in The Color Purple represent the two different lifestyles women held, which illustrated how discrimination can change someone's view on the world. Walker highlighted how different Celie was due to her experiences by having some of the minor characters be a foil to her. Both Shug and Sofia are foils to Celie throughout the novel because they are complete opposites to Celie. Celie had a difficult upbringing filled with discrimination and prejudice and therefore acts and sees the world around her differently than Shug and